Question

Does anybody know of anything that exists in the Java world to map midi note numbers to specific note names and octave numbers. For example, see the reference table:

http://www.harmony-central.com/MIDI/Doc/table2.html

I want to map a midi note number 60 to it’s corresponding note name (MiddleC) in octave 4. I could write a utility class/enum for this, but it would be rather tedious. Does anybody know of anything?

I’m specifically using this to write a Tenori-On/Monome clone in Java, so far so good…

Solution

This was what I ended up using:

String[] noteString = new String[] { 'C', 'C#', 'D', 'D#', 'E', 'F', 'F#', 'G', 'G#', 'A', 'A#', 'B' };  int octave = (initialNote / 12) - 1; int noteIndex = (initialNote % 12); String note = noteString[noteIndex]; 

Answer 1

I’m not convinced your suggestion is that tedious. It’s really just a divide-and-modulo operation, one gets the octave, the other gets the note.

octave = int (notenum / 12) - 1; note = substring('C C#D D#E F F#G G#A A#B ',(notenum % 12) * 2, 2); 

In real Java, as opposed to that pseudo-code above, you can use something like:

public class Notes {   public static void main(String [] args) {     String notes = 'C C#D D#E F F#G G#A A#B ';     int octv;     String nt;     for (int noteNum = 0; noteNum < 128; noteNum++) {       octv = noteNum / 12 - 1;       nt = notes.substring((noteNum % 12) * 2, (noteNum % 12) * 2 + 2);       System.out.println('Note # ' + noteNum + ' = octave ' + octv + ', note ' + nt);     }   } }